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Some tidying up — and a quick check of my Tarot, the two of cups telling me that yes, playing Suzy Homemaker had been the right call — and a little after six o’clock, the buzzer for the back entrance to the shop sounded.
Perfect.
I hurried downstairs and opened the door. Calvin Standingbear stood outside, looking diffident.
“Right on time,” I told him.
“What?”
“Come on in.”
Expression even more nonplussed, he came into the little space that served as the back entrance’s foyer. “We need to talk,” he said.
“I know,” I replied. “Come upstairs. Dinner is almost ready.”
“Dinner?”
“You’re hungry, aren’t you?”
“Well — ”
“Exactly.”
Without waiting for a reply, I made my way up the stairs. The sound of his quiet, heavy tread told me he’d decided to follow without argument.
When we went inside, the warm aromas of roasting chicken and rice pilaf with almonds greeted us.
“You weren’t joking, were you?” Calvin said.
“I never joke about food.” Which was only the truth. I didn’t know if I could classify myself as a full-on kitchen witch, but I liked to cook and to bake. The soothing routines of following recipes and adding my own personal touches really weren’t all that different from performing a ritual or crafting a spell jar, when you got right down to it.
I went into the kitchen and sneaked a peek at the rice. It looked ready to go, fluffy and luscious, and so I turned off the gas and left it to sit with the lid in place. Calvin glanced past me to the table, already set and with the bottle of wine open and airing.
“Please tell me you’re not still on duty,” I said, noting where his gaze had landed. “I mean, you can’t be on dutyallthe time, can you?”
“Technically, I’m off duty,” he allowed. “But we have a small department, so I’m still on call if something important comes up.”
“Well, a glass of wine won’t kill you.”
He made an amused sound, not quite a snort, but to my relief, he didn’t argue with me. Instead, he asked, “Can I help with anything?”
“We’re about ready to go,” I replied. “You could get the chicken out of the oven for me, though. The pot holders are in that drawer.”
I pointed, and he got out a pair of oven mitts decorated with bees and flowers. They looked so incongruous against his muscular forearms that I wanted to laugh. Somehow, though, I held it together while he knelt down and extricated the roasting pan and the golden-brown bird it held.
“You can set it down on the stovetop,” I said, and he put the pan in place on the section of stove not occupied by the pot of pilaf. “And then carve once it’s time to eat, because I’m actually terrible at that.”
He grinned at my confession, and I sent him over to sit down at the dining table so I could get everything dished up. Within a few minutes, we were both seated and ready to go, candles flickering at the center of the table and from the narrow buffet I used as a sideboard. As I was setting everything up, I’d thought about putting on some soft music to play in the background but had decided against it. I was probably already pushing things enough with the wine.
He’d already poured some pinot noir for both of us, so there wasn’t much to do except raise our glasses and clink them against one another.
“You got all this from a psychic flash?” Calvin asked after he took a sip.
“Well, it wasn’talla psychic flash,” I replied, then sipped some of my wine. Not bad. I didn’t really care for white wine with dinner, which was why I’d decided on the pinot noir instead of chardonnay or something. “That stink-eye you were giving me at Hazel’s house told me you wanted to talk, so I figured we might as well have our discussion over food.”
“It wasn’t a stink-eye,” he objected, and I tilted my head at him.
“I was on the receiving end of it,” I said. “It was totally a stink-eye.”
